FRANCE AT WAR: Jets Strike ISIS Stronghold; Terror Suspects Raided

Posted on Comments

 

Friday’s attack in Paris has prompted French authorities to take military action against the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa:

France bombed the Syrian city of Raqqa on Sunday night, its most aggressive strike against the Islamic State group it blames for killing 129 people in a string of terrorist attacks across Paris only two days before. . . .
While France has been conducting scores of airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq, it had been bombing inside Syria only sparingly, wary of inadvertently strengthening the hand of President Bashar al-Assad by killing his enemies.
But after militants with AK-47 rifles and suicide explosives vests shattered the peaceful revelry of Paris on Friday night, killing dozens of civilians in restaurants and at a concert hall, France seemed intent on sending a clear message of its determination to curb the Islamic State and its ability to carry out attacks outside the territory it controls.

The previous reluctance to hit ISIS in Raqqa, in other words, reflected the fact that the Syrian extremists were tacitly supported by the West since 2011, when the “Arab Spring” uprisings were orchestrated to overthrow the governments of Libya, Egypt and Syria. More on the French air strikes on Raqqa:

Twelve aircraft including 10 fighter jets dropped a total of 20 bombs in the biggest air strikes since France extended its bombing campaign against the extremist group to Syria in September, a Defense Ministry statement said. The jets launched from sites in Jordan and the Persian Gulf, in coordination with U.S. forces. . . .
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said France had the “legitimacy” to take action against ISIS after Friday’s terror attacks in Paris.
Fabius said Sunday on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Turkey that the decision to conduct airstrikes in Raqqa against Islamic State targets was a “political” one and that France had to be “present and active” following Friday’s attacks.

Ace of Spades points out that Raqqa is “a city the jihadis have kept in reasonably good shape . . . a showcase city . . . their military headquarters,” so that the previous failure to target Raqqa would seem rather inexplicable. As I say, however, ISIS was tacitly supported in the effort to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, which was part of the Obama administration’s “Arab Spring” policy dating back to 2011. That this policy has been a catastrophic failure, in effect arming ISIS terrorists, is something the administration and its former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, have been understandably reluctant to admit. Meanwhile, in France, authorities are rounding up the usual suspects:

French police launched more than 150 raids across the country overnight as part of a manhunt in the wake of Paris’s deadly terror attacks, NBC News reported.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls confirmed the raids to RTL Radio, according to NBC News. . . .
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said that 23 people had been arrested — while 104 others remained for questioning — over a 48-hour period. He added that guns, bulletproof vests and even a rocket launcher had been seized.
“This is just the beginning,” Cazeneuve said. “The response of France will be total. Those who attack France, we will catch them and we will be unrelenting with them … Terrorists will never destroy the Republic, because the Republic will destroy them.”
Searches took place throughout the country, including in Toulouse, Grenoble, Bobigny and Lyon.

The hunt for the Paris terrorist Salah Abdeslam continues. There were reports this morning that Abdeslam had been cornered by Belgian police in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, but officials there said the raid failed to nab him.

PREVIOUSLY:




 

 

133 comments

  1. And why haven’t Vietnamese terrorists taken revenge by flying planes into buildings, or the Chinese? The West certainly did no great things for them. Why haven’t S. and Central American terrorists wreaked revenge on Spain, or America? Why no M. Eastern grudges against the Turks?

  2. I see it as more than just the Middle East. I think it started with Wilson secretly sending troops to fight in the Russian revolution. There are some who date it with Perry and the opening of Japan.

    We’ve been meddling “for their own good” ever since.

    Americans wouldn’t tolerate it if it was done to us. Why shouldn’t other nations resent us when the US does it to them?

    I do not see a military solution working. It doesn’t help that the Obama Administration is incompetent.

  3. “Genocide”? Nonsense. It wasn’t genocide when we used the bomb against Japan. It was just a bigger bomb and fewer bombing runs. We had been firebombing the island already.

    “Educated” and “technological”? Pfft! What difference does that make? Ignorant savages will be impressed by a mushroom cloud quite well.

  5. YOU don’t have an answer to that question, because poverty and desperation do not drive extremism, though you desperately want that to be the case.

    Psychotic ideology drives extremism.

    Which is why, for the protection of everyone else, you have to go into extremist areas and kill everything that moves, without mercy and without question.

    In the Old Testament, God frequently told the Israelites to do this very thing, or sometimes He told them to kill every person except young girls, who were kept by the Israelites. Now please, go ahead and say that God is “messed up” and “mean”, because, you know, what possible knowledge of human nature could He have? Can’t wait to hear that backlash.

    This is why, if I were President, the first thing I’d do is withdraw from the UN. Then, let the carpet bombing begin. Problem sol-ved.

  6. I’ve been saying for years that we need to “weaponize” bacon — atomize bacon into an aerosol, and spray the bacon vapor into the air in our cities and especially large public venues (and airports!), such anyone in those areas knows that they have bacon molecules on their bodies … and, if they’re Moslem, they’ll “know” they’ll go to Hell should they die while wrapped in bacon.

  7. Though I certainly wouldn’t take genocide off the table. The Japanese weren’t extremists in the sense that Islamics are. The Japanese, when faced with the possibility of genocide, had the intelligence to say “ok, we’re done”.

    Islamics will never say this, or if they do, it’s an obvious lie, which we’ve seen historically. If genocide is what it takes, I would do that.

  8. That doesn’t mean that we should roll over, does it? A whole string of “tactical” victories can end up looking pretty strategic. So blast the convoys, hit their centers, shoot up every concentration of ISIS hard boyz, roll up their overseas cells, slit the throats of their financiers, and take away land, cattle and horses. At some point the softer ones will get the message, and the harder hard boyz, being fewer, will become nervous.

    Or I could just sit around like JackLO, wring my hands earnestly, and ask for more lotion.

  10. Wrong. Most of the ‘extremists’ in the Middle East are educated men. They’ve attended universities and are the sons of semi-wealthy to very wealthy men. That’s how they received the education they needed to rise up. Review the leadership of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and so on and you’ll find men who are (in addition to be evil) quite intelligent, and who grew up in the “one percent” of their societies.

  12. Last time I was there, it was pretty much a company strength unit.

    Of course, Camp Lemmoniere was originally an FFL base. They can send them in as fast as they can board the transports.

  13. Except that you will eventually pass the gravel. It’s more like inviting one of those facehuggers from Alien to hop on you.

  14. We’ve been doing all that in the Middle East for the last 14 years, and nothing has changed, well not nothing; they’re stronger, and we’re tired, weaker, and living in a surveillance state. There needs to be more than a military option, otherwise there will be some other group later on because the root causes will remain.

  15. That’s not what we’ve been doing. Neither party has had the gumption to do what needs to be done. Instead they piddle with ROE that are absurd and meant to insure the job doesn’t get done.

  17. It was an FFL Caserne when it was French Somaliland. I’ve heard they’ve been as much as Battalion strength, but the source was a bit dodgy so I can’t say for sure.

    I never got to the Indian Ocean region. When and what were you in?

  18. Me, neither. “If we just bomb them harder, we’ll win!” just seems ludicrous. I’m not a pacifist, and if I thought there was a way that “this time it would be different”, I’d support it, but I don’t see any change with a more intense air campaign. This administration has tried a number of ways to fix things and have made it worse every time. When history is written the Obama administration will be a long list of foreign policy blunders.
    I do not see a military campaign ending IS, or any other extremist group, either.

  19. If you don’t think poverty and desperation are driving extremism then you would be wrong, and most certainly drives recruitment in Europe. I don’t need it to be true, because it is true. Why is that so many people on the right labor under the delusion that poverty doesn’t create misery, murder, and radical political ideology? It’s ludicrous. And again, if there was a real military option we would have won, but there is not a single military analyst who believes there is.

  20. Well I check on this and you just posted.

    It doesn’t help that we’re being misdirected. Most of the 9-11 group were Saudis, and there is still a massive amount of support coming from private Saudi and government Saudi sources. Yet no one talks about that.

    We’re a centralized nation fighting distributed networks as if they are nations. We’re giving up our freedoms to a security state, and our government keeps paying companies who don’t have to produce anything, much less a working solution.

    We’ve got to look at what we’re doing. Why should there be an American Empire out there? What happened to our Republic?

  21. No, right. The heirarchy of the organization is not indicative of the entire organization. Most of the people being radicalized are poor, angry, marginalized, and hopeless. And it’s the same with every extremist movement. If you take a group of disaffected men with no future, or hope, and promise to give them their manhood, and a purpose in life they will follow you. It’s clear you don’t understand the headspace. Equating most recruits with the intelligentsia, and leadership is just wrong. In every military too, you have grunts and officers.

  22. They didn’t fly planes into the WTC for revenge. They did it because we’re over there, and second, to draw us into a conflict, wear us down, and drive their own recruitment, all of which they did. Are you saying doing more of the same will somehow create victory?

  24. First time, ’82, USS Peleliu (LHA-5). Latest was this year until July, USNS Alan Shepard (T-AKE 3). And a bunch of time in between.

  25. The 9/11 report is full of redacted passages that Senator Bob Graham claims shows involvement from the Saudi government, but oddly(or not), we didn’t attack them.

    In the beginning, post 9-11, the CIA, and other intelligence services wanted to take the lead to fight al Qaeda, and fight the war on terror as a police action, but instead the Bush administration, namely Cheney and Rumsfeld, wanted the DOD to run it, because they didn’t trust the CIA, and it would give them the power to direct the war, along with make money for their associates through military, and security contracts.

    What we got is many years of no win strategy as an army tried to win against decentralized, shadowy terror networks that hide amongst civilians, and mainly run covert operations.

  26. France is a nuclear power, they should have taken the 5 largest ISIS held cities and hit them with nukes. That would send a far stronger message than some nuisance bombings.

    The only way this ends is when someone out terrorizes the terrorists and their supporters. It would also serve as a warning to Iran as well.

  27. I agree with what you said, I’d run across it in my own readings.

    What worries me is that there is no historical context given here. There’s no one reputable (?) or at least in authority who says that this thing might have something to do with that 1987 thing, or with that other thing that happened in 1965. It’s like there’s a huge blind spot beyond 9-11.

    One thing we know about tribalism is that there are long memories sometimes lasting generations.

    I do see a possible way out, but it’s going to take about twenty-five years and require a whole new foreign policy. Meanwhile the Powers That Shouldn’t Be will fight to preserve the perpetual crisis.

  29. Poverty doesn’t create those things. You also make unfounded assumptions about poverty necessarily causing misery, let alone bloodthirst. You insult the poor.

    I can’t even bring to mind a single radical ideology that was not created and spread by the monied (and many times self-proclaimed “intellectual”) class.

    If you believe Mohammed, for example, was in “poverty” and “misery”, you’d be wrong about that. In fact, Islam grew because men discovered there was wealth to be had by conquering other groups and taking their assets. There’s also the matter of power and control over others.

    It is the LOVE OF MONEY that is the root of all evil, not poverty.

  30. And, so the “new” plan is to bomb ISIS(again), but this time with more bombs, and then what? Another extremist group steps in to fill the void? Without dropping another 150,000 plus troops in Iraq, and Syria, which will lead to another long, drawn out conflict, this doesn’t sound like too much of a plan.

  31. Yeah, because that would be a proportional response to the Paris attacks, and not vaporize, and slowly kill whose ever left in the civilian for the next generation or two. I dare anyone to watch the documentary “White Light/Black Rain”, which is about Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and say that kind of horror should be unleashed on a civilian population without real cause.

  32. The people that have dared to say this was caused by this, or that event at the hands of the American government like Ron Paul who was attacked by Rudolph Guiliani, and others for stating the truth that 9/11 was blowback for American foreign policy, and dare I say Obama, are immediately attacked as “blaming America”, and a whole host of other things. There is a contingent of the government and electorate who completely shutdown and refuse to acknowledge the countries mistakes, unless of course the opposition party was responsible for them.

  33. I guess that should serve as a lesson to petty dictators and tyrants. Don’t start wars you can’t win.

    Not all responses must be proportional. And you win wars by destroying your enemy’s capacity to wage war. Otherwise, you just waste lives.

    I am very close to “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”

  34. I agree, they don’t need to be totally proportional, but nuclear attacks as a response to a savage, but relatively small attack on Paris? I don’t think so. Nuclear attacks should only be in response to attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Second of all, since IS is not a nation-state you’d be basically mass murdering civilians, and blowing up part of Iraq. I feel like we’re getting back into that headspace the country had right after 9/11, and lead us down a deep dark hole, that we are only deeper in now.

  35. So, to sum up all your posts, there is no answer. I believe that you (and others here) are not taking a long enough view. Islam has been an aggressive, expansionist, tyrannical ideology since Day One. And I mean ALL of Islam, not just these so-called “radicals”. We, that is, the civilised West, have been fighting these fuckers for 1,400 years. It maybe that there is no way to eradicate the entire lot. BUT, we can cut the population by say, 90%, it would go a long way towards pacifying the ME for decades. Will that engender future hostility? You betcha. These assholes are STILL pissed over the fact they got tossed out of Spain. This is the real world version of The Forever War. It’s past time we started fighting like we mean it.

  36. There you go with stupid Rules Of Engagement. How about we treat themthe way they treat us?
    They kill innocent civilians, women and children. It’s time we started to do the same. And no, I don’t give a rat’s ass about creating future recruits. They seem to be doing just fine on there own. For 1,400 years, I might add.

  37. And the turn around time sortie to sortie would be really short. I’m always surprised that lefties so vehemently oppose discriminate bombing campaigns. Isn’t that the same as nondiscrimination?

  39. The failure isn’t in the concept of bombing campaigns but in the qualifiers you placed before. If one is determined to launch an ineffectual campaign to get the girl said campaign will be ineffectual. If one is determined to launch an effective campaign and keep escalating until it is, the only variable is time and material. The old ”you can’t kill enough of them” argument can only be valid once it’s proven mathematically that you can kill too many.

  44. Oh, the “root causes” argument, is it? Okay, here is the “root cause” of the problem in the Middle East: a fair number of people there are evil and are oppressing decent people.

    How to solve the problem? Kill enough of the evil ones that the rest crawl back into their holes.

    And if you say that can’t work, I remind you of a date: May 8, 1945. Check out what happened that day, and why.

  46. Reagan’s was the first Presidental election I was old enough to vote in (1980). Me and my brother went to hear his campaign speech, and he was so dynamic and charismatic. Wish we had him back again.

  47. This is BS. We always joke about the French as a bunch of surrender monkeys but look at the rhetoric. “You won’t destroy the Republic, because the Republic will destroy you.”

    Like Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sanders would ever use such rhetoric. Disgraceful how we are being led by Neville Chamberlains. I’m sick of it. ISIS could be crushed by the 82nd airborne alone within a week or two of operations. However even France isn’t sending any troops to Iraq though. No one really wants to do what it will do to take ISIS territory back. Not even France.

  48. Impossible to even take this conversation seriously. Ok, we’ll drop a hydrogen bomb on IS controlled Syria, and mass murder a million civilians over an attack on France that killed 150 people. That’s fucking brilliant, dude! and if you don’t worry about future recruitment sooner, or later they’re going to find a way to use a nuke on us.

  49. So, genocide of the middle eastern population on a scale greater than Nazi Germany perpetrated? Yeah, that’ll work, and should be little to no problem for the men tasked with carrying it out. Who gets to be in Einsatzgruppen A? That’s a rational plan Herr Himmler and glad you came up with it.

  50. And he was smart enough to realize after 250 Marines were killed by Hezbollah to pack up, and leave, and understood that we had no business in Middle Eastern politics. Let me ask you something: what do you think the response would be today if a President packed up, and left without retaliation, and said we shouldn’t have been there in the first place? Think it would play well with the current GOP, or conservative movement? I’m guessing, NO? Past presidents, like even GGeorge H.W. Bush understood this, too. You can’t occupy Middle Eastern countries, and nor do we truly understand their politics. Our adventure there since 2001 has been the greatest foreign policy blunder of all time, and will go on to collapse this country one day.

Comments are closed.